Written by

Bill Cary, Linda Lombroso and Heather Salerno

Rabbi Eytan Hammerman leads Temple Beth Shalom in Mahopac. He and other local clergy members will address the Connecticut shooting with their congregations this weekend. / Submitted photo/Temple Beth Shalom

The Rev. Adolphus Lacey, pastor of Mount Olivet Baptist Church in Peekskill, and other local clergy will address the Connecticut shooting with their congregations this weekend. / Submitted photo/Mount Olivet Baptist Church

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With the horrific school shooting heavy on their hearts, clergy across the Lower Hudson Valley are being asked to answer the unanswerable this weekend as their congregations gather for the close of Hanukkah and the beginning of Christmas. It’s normally a time of great joy and celebration — especially for the children who are the same age as the 20 youngsters killed in Connecticut on Friday.

“I just found out,” said the Rev. Paul Egensteiner of Emanuel Lutheran Church in Pleasantville, who was in his car with a parishioner. “I’m still processing it. It’s hard to fathom.”

“For a general explanation, I tell my congregation that it’s a broken world, that it’s not the world that God intended,” he said. “And it’s certainly not the world that God is finished with.”

“We can’t understand why this happens,” Egensteiner added. “Our job is to help and comfort those affected, to get them through it.”

Like the other clergy interviewed for this story, he’s not sure yet what he will say about the shooting as part of his sermon. “But yes, I have to touch on it,” he said. “Everybody will be bringing this to church with them, in their hearts and minds.”

The Rev. Adolphus Lacey, pastor of Mount Olivet Baptist Church in Peekskill, was driving with his two teenage children when they heard about the shooting. Their first question to him was, “Why would someone do this?”

“Unfortunately, I don’t have the answer,” said Lacey.

“But God did not intend this,” he added. “We have free choice, and as part of free choice, people make foolish and evil decisions that impact all of us.”

Rabbi Carla Freedman of Jewish Family Congregation, a reform synagogue in South Salem, planned to reference the victims at services this weekend, during both Mourners’ Kaddish — a prayer for the dead — and during prayers for the sick and recovering.

She called the shooting “beyond comprehension” and pointed to “some sort of societal breakdown” that is causing repeated acts of violence across the country.

“Everywhere I’ve been today, people are saying exactly the same thing: How could somebody do this, and at this time of year?” she said. “Somehow, as a society, we are failing if these kinds of things continue to happen and the amount of violence, the number of deaths, seems to increase each time. Who opens fire on kids who are in elementary school?”

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The Rev. DeQuincy Hentz, pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church in New Rochelle, suggests that the shooting raises broader questions.

“It seems like we have a generation of young people emerging now who have been impacted by social media and a need for attention and a need for their lives to be noticed,” he said. “That may have something to do with what we’re seeing.

“It’s an urgent message for gun control,” added Hentz. “Guns are much too accessible to people and they’re falling into the wrong hands.”

“I think sometimes we have young people who feel insignificant, that their lives don’t matter and that one way they can feel significant and make a mark is to perpetrate a great tragedy like this,” Hentz said.

At Chabad of the Rivertowns in Dobbs Ferry, Rabbi Benjy Silverman said the location of the shooting made it even more disturbing.

“It’s most tragic that this transpired in the most sacred of places: in a classroom that educates children,” he said. “So I think the message we would send is they are not alone, that the entire nation mourns together with them.”

Moving forward, added Silverman, we need to transform the pain, anger and sadness into positive action. “Perhaps the question we ask ourselves is how can we educate and raise the next generation to value human life more than we do today?”

Rabbi Eytan Hammerman of Temple Beth Shalom, a conservative synagogue in Mahopac, addressed the issue of faith — and the timing of the shooting during the year’s brightest season. “Today, we saw only darkness.”

“I would not be able to have faith if I did not know in my heart that the vast majority of humanity would never do something like this,” he added. “It simply is not human.

“The only things that we — all of us, of any faith — can do today are to hold and hug those who survived this horrific tragedy and to be with those awfully many bereaved family members, standing with them and crying with them in the face of ultimate evil,” he said.

The Rev. Msgr. Hilary Franco of St. Augustine’s Catholic Church in Ossining, which also runs an elementary school with 562 children, was still reeling at the news of the mass slaying on Friday. “Right now,” he said, “the only thing we can do is pray.”